Iago. I mock you! No, by Heaven: would you would bear your fortunes like a man.

Shakespeare

With
this attention-grabbing cartoon, Thomas Nast intended both to generate
opposition to President Andrew Johnson's lenient Reconstruction plan
and to gain support in
the fall 1866 elections for Republican congressional candidates who
endorsed a more radical Reconstruction policy. At center
stage, the artist applies a Shakespearean motif, as he often did, to
cast Johnson as the evil Iago plotting against the heroic and innocent
Othello, the Moor (African).Nast
portrays the main black character as a wounded Union veteran who is
being denied his just and earned place in American political life.Posters on the wall behind the two men remind viewers of the
president’s past promises, vetoes of Reconstruction legislation, and
pardons of former Confederates.

President Johnson announced his
Reconstruction plan soon after he became president, following Lincoln's
assassination, and implemented it during the summer of 1865 when
Congress was in recess.Johnson’s
Reconstruction program offered general amnesty to all who would take an
oath of future loyalty.The
plan, however, called for high-ranking Confederate officials or any
wealthy white Southerner to petition the president personally for
individual pardons.(Raised
in poverty in North Carolina and eastern Tennessee, Johnson, a War
Democrat, resented the Southern planter aristocracy, and
relished the idea of them begging him for pardons.)In order to be readmitted, a state would have to ratify the 13th
Amendment, which abolished slavery, and repudiate Confederate war debts.By the end of 1865, all the former Confederate states had
complied with Johnson’s plan and were ready to reenter the Union on an
equal status with all the other states.

However, the Radical
Republicans and a good number of other Northerners, too, did not want to
see those former Confederate states reenter the Union so quickly and
easily.They were disturbed
by: 1) the reluctance with which slavery was abolished in the
South; 2) the refusal of all the states to grant voting rights to black
men; 3) the election of former Confederate leaders to state or national
office—e.g., Georgia elected former Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens to the U. S. Senate; and, 4) the
enactment by southern legislatures of laws—known as Black Codes—that
limited the rights and freedoms of blacks in the South (like slave codes
did before the war).

When Congress reconvened in
December 1865, they refused to seat the representatives from the states
reconstructed under Johnson’s plan, and they insisted that Congress
must control the process. In the spring and summer of 1866, the
president further alienated the Republican majority in Congress by
vetoing the Freedmen's Bureau Act
and the Civil Rights Act,
although they eventually overrode the vetoes.

In this cartoon, the scene
depicting a slavery auction and lashing (upper-center) underlines the
continuity between the pre-war and post-war South.Nast incorporates images of race riots in Memphis
(upper-left) and New Orleans (upper-right) as symbols of the sustained
and extreme violence against blacks committed by some Southern whites.

During the Civil War, the black
population in Memphis quadrupled, and racial tensions were high.The riot was sparked on May 1, 1866, when the horse-drawn hacks
of a black man and a white man collided.As a group of black veterans tried to intervene to stop the
arrest of the black man, a crowd of whites gathered at the scene.Fighting broke out, and then escalated into three days of
racially motivated violence, primarily pitting the police (mainly
Irish-Americans) against black residents. When it was over, 46
blacks and two whites had been killed, five black women raped, and
hundreds of black homes, schools, and churches had been vandalized or
destroyed by arson.

While the Memphis riot was a
manifestation of the general hostility that many Southern whites felt
toward blacks during the Reconstruction era, the New Orleans riot was
related specifically to Reconstruction politics.The reelection of the former Confederate mayor in New Orleans,
John Monroe, and other signs of the increasing influence of erstwhile Confederates,
led Louisiana Governor James Madison Wells to call a state
constitutional convention.He
endorsed enfranchising black men, banning former Confederates from
voting, and other Radical Republican goals.

On July 30, 1866, 25 delegates
and 200 black supporters assembled in New Orleans for the constitutional
convention.A fight began
on the street outside the hall between opponents and supporters of the
convention.The arrival of the police, sympathetic to the Confederate
cause, only worsened the conflict.General Philip Sheridan, in charge of the Louisiana military
district, was out of the state when the riot occurred, but later
described it as “an absolute massacre.”During the New Orleans riot, 34 blacks and three white Radicals
were killed, and over 100 persons were injured.Together, the Memphis and New Orleans riots provoked scornful
opposition in the North to President Andrew Johnson’s lenient Reconstruction
agenda.

In the lower-center frame of
this cartoon, Johnson-the-snake-charmer is joined by his top cabinet
officials (l-r), Secretary of State William Henry Seward, Secretary of
the Navy Gideon Welles, and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton.(Johnson’s later attempt to oust Stanton
for
working behind the scenes with Congressional Radicals led to the
president’s impeachment.)The
bottom side-panels contrast the situation in New Orleans during the
Civil War and during the Johnson administration.On the left (1862), a humbled Confederate soldier must bow to
Union General Benjamin Butler; on the right (1866), General
Philip Sheridan is forced to submit to the same former Rebel.

As cartoonist Nast hoped, so
many Republican congressional candidates won in the fall of 1866 that
their majority could easily override any presidential veto. In the
spring of 1867, the new Republican-controlled Congress began passing and
implementing its own Reconstruction plan.